


you've got the future

by Aezlo



Series: Rest and Recovery [3]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alien Biology, Canon Autistic Character, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Name Changes, POV Alternating, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Withdrawal, the saga of Wrong Hordak's name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24838402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aezlo/pseuds/Aezlo
Summary: Entrapta and a band of clones and Etherians head back to Dryl to begin settling in, refurbishing the abandoned Crypto Castle, and eventually helping in the efforts to rebuild Etheria.
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Series: Rest and Recovery [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1786942
Comments: 66
Kudos: 196





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note that this begins directly after the previous bit(s) in the series, so you should probably read those first!

He wakes slowly, a methodical rocking easing him back to consciousness. He winces as he automatically pats at the lines to the hivemind, but he’s getting used to it by now. Prime must have put some sort of conditioning on them to cause them to automatically check-in upon waking, because even with the negative conditioning of pain, he still can’t seem to stop the impulse.

Hordak rubs his face tiredly, glancing around the interior of one of his old transports as it continues to lurch slowly towards Dryl. One of the Etherians is at the helm at the moment, as he finds Entrapta ensconced in her hair and blankets on a cot near the wall next to him. She appears to be smiling in her sleep, curled around her hair and drooling slightly. For some reason, it makes him smile.

He feels himself being watched, and turns to sweep the rest of the interior of the transport. There’s a number of cots set up as well as crates of supplies. They’re taking back four other clones besides himself, as well as a few Etherians that are familiar with either Entrapta or her castle and have offered to help, including the one who had provided her with the fizzy drink.

He finds his watcher easily, a pair of yellow eyes and a bitten mouth glowing faintly across the cabin. It’s the clone who injured his hand who has followed Hordak unobtrusively since he’s bandaged his hand. He hadn’t expressly asked for permission to have the clone join them, and the injured clone hadn’t really asked whether he could come, either. A spare cot and supplies had been provided, nonetheless.

They’d spent a day prepping and collecting materials (and people) to head back to the Crypto Castle, while Entrapta had Emily wander and scout the labyrinthine halls of her prior home. It was in disrepair, so they’d had to make sure they brought plenty of basic supplies to supplement until they got things back under control.

The clone across the cabin shrinks in on himself upon being noticed, chewing on a talon of his uninjured hand.

“Come here,” Hordak beckons quietly. He might get up and lumber across the transport, but the lurching and his current instability won’t mix well. He shifts on the cot so that there’s room, and the clone quickly scuttles across the transport to sit about a foot away from Hordak on the cot, still tense. Hordak had changed the bandaging on his hand yesterday as the clone appeared to have a strong negative reaction to seeing the open wound. Hordak could certainly relate, but necessity had long-since culled that particular squeamishness from him.

Hordak gently puts a hand on the clone’s shoulder, slow enough that he might duck away from the gesture if he wants, and it seems to ease his tension some. He stops chewing on his talon, and shuffles a little closer. He reminds him so much of Imp when he was young, but it’s a bittersweet thing. He will never see Imp again… hopefully the creature survived Horde Prime’s invasion, and Hordak’s abandonment prior to _that_. Imp is self-reliant, could certainly hunt and care for himself, but if any clone worth his salt notices him and realizes what he is, he will be killed on sight. It’s best to hope that Imp remains alive and happy in the wilds somewhere, rather than entertain thoughts of the more pragmatic alternative.

“Are you in pain? Remember to raise it above your hearts,” he offers quietly, and the clone obligingly does, cradling his own shoulder to anchor his hand and accidentally brushing Hordak’s away.

“Is it keeping you awake?” he asks, and the clone nods at the ground, still chewing at his lip. “Hmm,” Hordak looks around at the crates surrounding them, and carefully levers himself up to rummage in one behind the head of his cot. He pulls out a slightly used medical kit, significantly less gauze and cloth in this one, and pokes around until he finds one of the gel cold packs.

“See this?” he offers it forth to the clone next to him, and he peers at it. “They are color-coded, blue for cold, and red for hot. You’ll want cold for this,” he pulls at the pack, separating the blue from red at the perforation and repacking the remaining hot pack into the medical kit. “You just—” he gently cracks it in his hand, and the cold blooms from inside it, “crush the pack, not enough to break the plastic. The chemicals will make it cold for a time. Here, put it on your hand.”

The clone takes it and places it carefully over his injured digits, and a look of surprise passes over his face.

“It won’t last for long, but it will help.”

* * *

They expected it to take two days to get to Dryl from Craggmine, but Emily’s reports of increased vegetation end up being somewhat understated, or perhaps misinterpreted. She is significantly smaller in size than a beefed-up horde transport, to be fair. Entrapta directs the bot to come back and meet them after the second day of cutting through jungles where there had previously been sharp cliffs and temperate forests.

Emily makes it to them on the morning of the third day, and they follow her route to the castle, or try to at least. The path is too small for their bulky transport in places, but they persevere, and the castle is in sight by nightfall.

“Welcome to the Crypto Castle!” Entrapta starfishes her limbs out, vibrating with excitement. “Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve been home,” she wiggles and hugs herself as she twirls into the courtyard.

“Should we really enter the castle at night, Princess?” Sodapop asks, holding a lantern up and peering up at his prior place of employment. A crack of lightning manages to time perfectly with the moment, crackling through the lightning rod on top of the castle.

“Hmm,” Entrapta hums, rocking back and forth a bit. “I suppose I’m going to have to put up maps now, if we’re going to have clones, and other visitors. And, Emily wasn’t able to finish a sweep of the labyrinth, so there may be more surprises in there for us…” she rubs her chin, deep in thought.

“We can simply camp in the courtyard, it appears to be what the horde did,” Bayani, a prior townsperson who’d offered to help rebuild, gestures at one of the crates that’s got a tarp over one end.

Entrapta makes a disconcerted noise, still wiggling a little in place. “I really wanted you to see the inside of my castle,” she grumbles.

“They will,” Bayani gives her a fortifying smile. “But you—hey wait!” Wrong Hordak has, of course, managed to wander off near one of the traps near the entrance.

“You’ve boobytrapped your castle?” Hordak asks, and he sounds mildly impressed.

“I—I mean, uh, some of it came from my dads, but, uhm, I added on to it,” she twists her hands in front of her a little bashfully, before turning at the sound of Wrong Hordak’s shout, “and oh, well, the trap Wrong Hordak just fell in is mine!” Hordak chuckles softly and she beams. “Oh. Wait. Let me go get him out. We should, yes, we should set up camp out here. That is a good idea!” she calls over her shoulder.

She rushes off and triggers the same trap that Wrong Hordak just did and then leans down to drag the clone out with her hair. He seems very shaken by the entire endeavor, but still very game, as always. He wobbles over to sit near Hordak on a low box.

“Is it normal for doors to open up pits underneath you?” he asks shakily, smoothing down his now slightly sooty tunic.

“Only if you’re doing it right,” Hordak goads, completely deadpan, and one of the Etherian’s nearby setting up camp squawks on a choked laugh.

“No! No, it is not, actually!” Bayani throws an arm around Wrong Hordak’s shoulders protectively before throwing a slightly miffed glare at Hordak, muttering something surely disparaging about his character under her breath.


	2. Chapter 2

Entrapta is a bit surprised at how happy she is to be home. It’s been nearly three years since she’s called the Crypto Castle home, but it _is_ her home, had been for all of her thirty-two years prior to choosing to stay with Hordak in the Fright Zone. It feels good to be back, like shrugging on an old sweater, but, also like an old sweater, it’s a little full of spiders and doesn’t fit quite as nicely as she remembers. It seems so much smaller than when she’d been here last. Perhaps her world’s just gotten bigger.

There’s so much to do now that she’s back though, and it’s difficult to keep track of. Even with a map of the halls, Emily hadn’t been able to scout everything within the castle before Entrapta had to call her back to guide them. There are remnants of Prime’s takeover about, but there don’t appear to be any clones or drones lingering behind. A family of alarmingly large elemental spiders has taken up residence in one of the wings, and much of her preferred furnishings had been moved to the Fright Zone prior to all this, leaving the entire place feeling a bit echoey and empty.

Entrapta keeps making lists of all the things she needs to buy, or make, or scrounge up, or just plain _do,_ but she’s being pulled in so many directions that she keeps forgetting to turn on her recorder as she’s muttering them aloud to herself. She isn’t entirely aware of it with how preoccupied she is, but for the past half-hour she’s been darting around in place, making audio notes and attempting to rouse and direct her robots with limited success.

Bayani, who Entrapta had last noticed organizing the contents of one of the old Horde crates, steps into Entrapta’s way and gives her a pitying smile. “Do you need help, Princess?” she asks, leaning down just a little so that she’s closer to Entrapta’s height, which just makes Entrapta compulsively push herself up on her hair to make herself taller.

“There’s just so much to do!” she wiggles her fists, her eyes a little glazed, trying to remember the list she was just enumerating aloud. “We need to clear out the spiders in the west wing, find or make furniture to make up for what’s missing, set up maps, clear a road so it’s easier for transports to reach us, rebuild my lab—”

“Alright, alright,” Bayani holds up a hand. “One thing at a time, Princess. How about maps? I always hated getting lost in there,” she jabs a finger at the castle.

“Right! I’ll make data pads for everyone and just upload maps onto that!” she rushes off, making verbal notes for herself. Eventually she needs to make and put up digital maps of the castle at various key points as a static map won’t work; some parts of her castle move around of their own volition, and she needs to note anytime she puts in (or removes) new traps. There’s a passel of unused screens in an unmarked crate that she quickly begins renovating into very rudimentary data pads, and as she’s working on her third one, she hears the tell-tale sound of either Emily or Hordak’s wheelchair approaching from behind her and turns to look.

“Do you need assistance?” Hordak asks, looking mildly bemused at the pile of screens and other gadgets that she’s reimagining as data pads.

“Yes!” Entrapta grins at him. She’s sure that she’s never going to be tired of the way his face always softens when she smiles at him.

“What are you making?” he asks, maneuvering a little closer to look at the handful of data pads she’s created already.

“Data pads for everyone. We need maps because I built my castle to be a labyrinth, or, well, _rebuilt_ my family’s castle into a labyrinth. It sort of was before that, each generation of the Dryl line adds more and more traps and it got to the point that it was suuuper cluttered! So, I created the articulated labyrinth so that all the traps could stay and be experienced by everyone, without ever having to get rid of any!”

“I see,” Hordak offers mildly, taking one of her finished pieces in hand and studying the connections she’s added. After a quick perusal, he picks up a screen and begins replicating her work, attaching circuits to the back, and they work pleasantly in silence for a bit. After they’ve both finished two more, he asks, “How many are you planning to make?”

“We need one for everyone here and then I’m going to put some up at key points in the castle, too,” Entrapta squints at a tiny screw that appears to have become stripped. “Oh! Hordak, you know those old scrap-collecting bots you had at the Fright Zone?” she turns to him.

“…yes?” he offers hesitantly, pushing a partially finished pad over for her to do the fine-tune screw-ins since he doesn’t have the screwdriver.

“Can we retrofit one of your old bots into a larger one of those? We need to collect a lot of furniture and household items for the castle, not to mention lab equipment! I took nearly everything to the Fright Zone, and it’s likely going to be a while before supply chains are back online to provide us with finished goods,” she sticks out her tongue as she tries to use the pad of her thumb to nudge the stripped screw free from its lodging. For some reason, she doesn’t think of using her hair to slither in and tug it out.

“I—ah,” his ears swivel downward, and he seems to sink into himself. “I… acted rashly,” his hands seem to shake a little more, and he sets the next tablet down a little more forcefully than he meant to, jumping at the noise it makes.

“Huh?” Entrapta turns her attention back to him, rapidly screwing in five screws at once with the wires on her mask now that the stripped screw is taken care of.

“I’m afraid that I had… Scorpia and Catra get rid of your things,” he taps his talons nervously on the edge of the crate, eyes downcast.

“Oh! But Scorpia kept Emily, and Emily says that Catra wanted her scrapped! Maybe Scorpia saved some of my things! That’s a great idea, let me give her a call,” she pulls out her personal data pad, and dials in Scorpia’s number, heedless of the trembling, upset clone next to her.

“Entrapta!” Scorpia beams once the connection clicks, the silvers and golds of Brightmoon’s walls shimmering behind her.

“Hi Scorpia!” Entrapta waves exuberantly with one of her hair hands.

“Oh, boy, am I glad to hear from you! Oh, are you back at your castle?” Scorpia visibly peers around at the edges of her screen.

“Yep! Do you know if any of my belongings are still at the Fright Zone? I know you saved Emily—”

“If they were left at the Fright Zone, they are likely rubble,” Hordak grumbles darkly to her right.

“Oh! You know, I—I wasn’t _supposed_ to, but I did send a couple of crates of your stuff to your castle. Hordak went through some of your stuff when he was building his arm-canon thingy, but everything else should be there!”

“You made an arm canon?” Entrapta gives Hordak a genuinely intrigued look, but he just grunts and places another data pad on the pile.

“What sort of crates were they? Oh wait,” Entrapta does a double-take at the crate that she and Hordak are working with, and squeaks in joy, wiggling in place a bit once she realizes. “Oh, this is one of them! Great!”

“Oh good, I’m glad they got there,” Scorpia rubs the back of her head with a claw. “I didn’t have time to really check the address,” she adds sheepishly.

“Thanks Scorpia!” Entrapta beams. “You’re at Brightmoon?” she asks, seeing the glint of the Moonstone in the background of Scorpia’s feed.

“Yeah! Perfuma and Adora and the gang invited me back here. We’ve had some bumps, I guess whatever Prime did with the Heart ended up messing up the connection to the runestones? Glimmer’s been having trouble with hers,” Scorpia looks puzzled. A muffled voice comes through Scorpia’s end, and she looks past the screen in surprise.

“Oh, it’s Entrapta,” Scorpia smiles. “Come say hi!” There’s a rustle of the screen getting jostled, and then Perfuma gets dragged into frame, her face and hair squished to Scorpia’s cheek as Scorpia pulls her close to fit in frame.

“Hello,” Perfuma wiggles her fingers in greeting and Entrapta waves back a little uncertainly.

“You should stop by sometime, or—are you going to move back to your castle?” Scorpia tilts her head back in thought, and a lock of Perfuma’s curly hair gets caught on her cheek insets, causing Perfuma to wiggle out of her grasp and give her a mildly flustered look. “Oh, sorry,” Scorpia gives her a sheepish grin.

“Yep!” Entrapta picks up a data pad that Hordak worked on, finishing the screws on it as the conversation continues to drag on and she’s starting to lose focus. “I have a lot to rebuild, but that’s part of the fun!” Perfuma whispers something behind a hand, and Entrapta lets her mask clink down in front of her face as she solders a slightly warped circuit into place.

“Well, uh, it looks like we’ve got a Princess Luncheon to get to, sorry Entrapta,” Scorpia pushes her hair out of her face and gives her a smile.

“No problem! Thanks for saving my stuff!” Entrapta pulls another data pad to her and peruses the screws Hordak put in.

“We should talk again soon!” Scorpia offers, as Perfuma begins to pull her off screen. “Bye!” The screen blips off and Entrapta sets the data pad aside to keep focusing on what she’s working on now.

“Oh, I think that’s plenty,” Entrapta starts at the large stack of data pads Hordak has managed to put together while she was on the call, tottering a little. “We can use some of these on the walls for visitors! And, ooh, we can make it so that they can just connect to the wall-pads and download the map into their personal data pads,” she pushes up her mask and grins. Hordak nods faintly, clasping his hands in his lap as they tremor slightly.

“Do you need any other assistance?” Hordak asks, holding himself stiff enough that she’s having trouble reading where he’s looking.

“Oh, just the scrap bots?” Entrapta asks, then frowns a little at his stiffness. “Are the braces on your arms bothering you? Note to self, we still need to research mesh and bracing technology for Hordak’s arms,” she clicks her recorder on and off for the note.

“They are fine,” Hordak gives her a sharp nod. He plucks up one of the data pads from the finished stack, and taps at it.

“Oh, let me give you access to your files, and a map to the castle, and—just a sec!” Entrapta pulls a wire from somewhere and connects her data pad to the rudimentary one Hordak was just holding and after a bit of fiddling hands it back.

“I will have a prototype built by this evening,” Hordak offers, clumsily typing into the screen.

“I’m going to go hand all these out and send a party in to take care of the spiders!” Entrapta collects up a slew of the data pads in her hair and spins off to begin doling them out. 


	3. Chapter 3

Hordak maneuvers himself over to one of the large shipping crates that he’s expecting to be full of bots. It looks like someone made a rough attempt at cracking the doors open at some point, but the mechanical lock, and their lack of a proper tools, stymied them. He’s going to have to fix the keypad attached to the door to get it open.

It’s supposed to work with a designated keycard either given to you when you were on a mission that needed these transports, or just as a benefit of being a high enough ranking officer. The keycard would allow you access to the crate as well as pairing your data pad with the crate so that you could use whatever bots or supplies were in the crate. Hordak was hoping that his old admin keycodes would still work, and if not, well, when he hacked his way into being able to direct the bots, there shouldn’t be anyone back at the Fright Zone to see his security breach.

Hordak’s trying to jimmy a loose wire into a spot where he’ll have room to reconnect it to the keypad when a monotonous voice asks over his shoulder, “What are you working on, brother?”

Hordak jerks in surprise, losing his balance and managing to stab his talons into the door of the shipping crate.

“Oh,” the clone states, eyes flicking to the hand now embedded in the crate-door. This clone is one that he’s unfamiliar with, though he could potentially have known him before all this. There were no names, no identities truly allowed by Prime, so in the hivemind you simply greeted one another with a mind-to-mind handshake which would identify you to one another. It was quite intimate, a brush of shared memories and feelings between two beings to remind one another of their connections and prior interactions.

It will be a change for them all, acquiring names and growing into their own identities. Not all of them had been defective from the beginning like him, never meant to be part of the whole. He’s avoided thinking about it, but given his circumstances, his eventual turn had to have been a bit inevitable considering.

He grumbles to himself and gracelessly unhooks his talons from the metal of the door, checking his fingertips for abrasions for a moment while subtly readjusting his weight to stabilize himself again.

“I am attempting to rewire this crate to open it and access the bots inside,” he states, peering in the holes he’s just punctured and finding that the fumble was a boon, actually, because the wire he’d been attempting to coax closer to the keypad is easier to adjust now.

The clone tilts his head to watch, and another clone comes up behind him and peers over his shoulder, subtly touching his arm. Ah, they’re the pair that Entrapta took to stop the meltdown, he recalls.

“May we be of assistance?” the first clone asks, a faint furrow in his brow as he concentrates on Hordak’s ministrations.

Hordak grunts, biting his lip as he uses his fingers to nudge the wires into place without proper visibility, functioning on touch alone. Their talons are not sensitive, nor particularly sharp, but the wires are fiddly enough that he’s nudging them with the edges of his nails and hoping they align where he needs them to be.

“There,” Hordak sighs as the keypad powers up, light blinkering on. He types in a number, a random string he changes every few… months, or whenever he remembers, really. It blinks red at him and bleeps, rejecting his input, and he scowls. One of the clones behind him makes a curious noise. He wracks his brain, and tries a different number. The pad does nothing for a period of time before finally blinking green, the sound of the mechanical latch disengaging rewarding his efforts.

The door releases, but gets stuck as the ceiling of the crate has warped, and as he peers inside the crate, he can see that there’s some weather-damage to the contents.

“Can you grab the door?” he gestures, and one of the clones steps forward and grips it firmly. Hordak mimics pulling back and the clone pauses, but realizes his meaning after a moment and wrenches the door open.

“And, here—” he loses his balance, and trips forward, leaning against the crate and huffing a bit. “Uhm, this—this will disconnect,” he bites down the burst of nervousness at showing weakness, he needs to _focus_ , he needs to get these bots ready for Entrapta. With the door fully extended, the keypad pulls off of the door, an emergency data pad in case you forgot your own which could be used to control the bots.

“What’s it for?” the clone releases the door and hesitantly reaches out as if to help Hordak regain his balance, but he weaves back from his touch without any thought, stumbling back roughly into his chair. It knocks the air out of him, and he has to shake his head a little as it continues to spin.

 _Focus_ , he schools himself.

“It’s. It will allow me to control the bots,” he swallows, shaking his head faintly and brushing his hair back out of his face.

The clone peers into the crate, and his ears quirk a little. He’s much better at suppressing emotional expression than Hordak ever was, and he’s unaware of his own ears curling down as he scowls mildly.

There’s supposed to be twelve bots in the crate, but there’s only five left, and a hole in the ceiling of the crate has let the elements in, leaving one of them red and crusty with rust on one side. Hordak spends a few minutes connecting the rudimentary data pad with the aged and warped keypad, and finally manages to get to the screen to start up the bots. He types in his admin keycode again, and the sound of multiple bots in the area powering up, in all the crates nearby, causes a few Etherians camped next to one of the crates to yelp and jump back in alarm.

“Drones?” the clone next to him asks curiously, and his companion tilts his head but seems to hide a little bit more behind him at the idea that these might be a new, unknown type of drone.

“Robots,” Hordak corrects. “There is no hivemind here,” he reminds them gently.

“Robots,” the clone hidden behind the first steps forward a bit, hesitantly touching one near the entrance to the crate. Apparently, the urge to pat the spherical bots is something absolutely intrinsic in all creatures, Hordak muses.

“They look different,” the first clone frowns faintly.

“They are my design,” Hordak taps his screen a little, prodding the ones in the crate in front of him to wake up fully and assemble for him to review their status. There’s a loud scraping noise punctuated by a crack as the rusted one tries to stand and one of its legs snaps under the weight of its body and its’ weakened, rusted state.

“What will you do with them?” the more talkative clone asks, his voice a little wondrous.

“I will be making scrap-bots with them. You may help,” he offers.


	4. Chapter 4

The team of bots and people that Entrapta sent to deal with the spiders comes back covered in web and filthy dust, chased from the wing by the spiders. With Hordak’s new access to the crates, she equips them with some blasters and stun rods, and sends them back in. She almost holds Emily back as one of the bots got damaged in the last attempt, left with a large rend through its chassis from a sharp pair of spider jaws. Hordak takes the sparking bot in and is either repairing it or working it into the scrap-bot prototype he’s building, she can’t quite tell.

He’s managed to acquire a posse of nearly all the clones, and a few Etherians as well, including the faun boy who’d been super excited to drive the transport here. There’s one clone standing with Sodapop, watching him stir a pot of something in interest. It looks like it might be the one with his hand wrapped, but it’s difficult to tell at this distance.

The second attempt on the spiders returns victorious in the mid-afternoon, mildly singed by reflected blaster fire, but the spiders are all either dead or forced to evacuate. Entrapta sends Emily and another bot on a scouting mission through the castle to surveil the damage, giving her a roadmap of the amount of work ahead of them.

Entrapta herself spends most of the day reviewing the crates sent by Scorpia full of her old things. Her old camelback sofa, her old bed, technically, has been ruined by a variety of animals roosting in the cushions in the past year, destroying the upholstery and deteriorating the wood. She consolidates much of the gadgetry into her current lab kit, and begins reworking some of the horde bots into construction and moving bots. It’s surprisingly simple, Hordak put in some sort of all-purpose mode for the bots which makes them open themselves up and offer their innards to be exchanged or upgraded easily.

Not all of the bots in the courtyard _want_ to be construction or moving bots, so she only renovates those that feel like they’ll enjoy the job. 

Time moves scarily quickly when they’re all working on things, and soon enough it’s nightfall and her feeble hopes that they’d be able to move into the castle today evaporate. Sodapop and an elfin cook call that dinner’s ready, and everyone clogs around the camp kitchen that they’ve put together on the fly. They don’t have enough cups to make her a bunch of tiny cups of the savory stew, so the cook gives her one small bowl and a kettle filled with the stew, with a fizzy drink on the side.

Entrapta takes her tray to go find Hordak in the area around the camp kitchen, but he’s not there. He and one of the engine-room clones are still over by his scrap-bot prototype and he is absolutely _radiating_ frustration to the point that she can sense it from across the yard. She grabs a few of the snack and fluid packs for the two clones and heads over to roust Hordak from his self-imposed exile.

“Hi! You should both eat!” she thrusts two packs at each of them with her hair. Hordak grunts, ignoring the offered meal, and doesn’t move from his position elbow-deep in bot innards. The other clone takes his packs, and nods. Like most of the other clones, except for Hordak and Wrong Hordak, he’s still in his original clone outfit, so he just shifts the bodysuit aside and clips in the pack easily.

Entrapta harrumphs a little, and sets her still-steaming tray down on a nearby box, and moves forward to inspect the source of Hordak’s frustration. “You should take a break,” she pushes again, and Hordak tenses almost imperceptibly as she draws closer.

“It will be done,” Hordak grunts, jerking as whatever he’s leaning forward to try to slot into place flies out of his hands and clatters deeper into the body of the bot. He growls deeply, baring his teeth, and clenching his shuddering hands in frustration.

“I don’t need it by today,” Entrapta frowns, a tendril of her hair snaking into the bot and pulling out the loose piece and holding it out tentatively.

Hordak exhales angrily through his teeth, glaring at the interior he’s been working on like it’s done him a personal disservice.

“I think you need a break,” Entrapta puts the loose piece next to her tray and her hair reaches up to begin righting Hordak from his leant-forward position, tilted into the bowl of the scrap-bot so that he can access the circuitry at its the base.

“I am fine,” he snaps irritably, his eyes flashing at her, but as she manhandles him, he doesn’t fight or hold himself stiff. She helps him into his chair, and gently readjusts him until he seems comfortable, a lock of hair patting his head once he’s settled. He grumbles and huffs, but after a moment he leans back and heaves a deep sigh, seeming relaxed besides the heavy tremoring of his hands.

“Your braces aren’t working,” Entrapta rubs her chin with a tuft of hair.

“It is fine,” Hordak grumbles, and plucks the food and fluid packs from her hair with a shaky hand. “Did your team manage the spiders?” Hordak asks tentatively, fiddling with the folds of his overlarge shirt to access the ports.

“Yes! Well, one of the bots was disabled, but it’s still in there. I think we’ll be able to start moving in by tomorrow morning!”

Hordak nods slightly, and she becomes aware of the clone from the engine room watching their interaction intensely. She turns towards him and waves, and he looks startled to be acknowledged directly. “How about you? How was working with Hordak today?” She hears Hordak give a faintly amused _hmmph_ next to her, perhaps at the clone’s deer-in-the-headlights look.

“It is… beneficial to study his technique. I never considered creating things like this,” he offers after a long moment of thought, his face strangely blank through it all.

“You can do whatever you want! I mean. Well, hrm,” she looks a little consternated, flashing on the portal, and nearly blowing up her friends with the EKSes, among other things. “Within reason,” she amends, twiddling her hair hands antsily.

“Within reason?” the clone asks. He’s better at expressing emotion through tone of voice than facially, which is interesting. So much diversity within a group made to be identical!

“Well…” she draws out the word, trying to figure out how exactly to explain her point when she’s not fully solid on it herself. “Ehhh, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she waves a hair hand in the air as if clearing the air. The clone seems to furrow his brow faintly and shares a look with Hordak, who ultimately just shrugs.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild emetophobia content warning for this chapter (mostly off-screen)

Entrapta wakes in the morning to find a few messages and a new program on her data pad from Hordak. The sun is barely getting strong enough to be felt behind the constant cloud cover over her castle, but Hordak’s working on what appears to be a second and third version of the scrap-collecting bots. Of the messages he’s left, one timestamped an hour prior states that the prototype is up and running, and he’s sent it go collect metal scraps while offering her a program to direct them to collect whatever she finds most needful in the moment.

He seems to be delegating a bit more today, his hands visibly shaking even from this distance as he points out things to the clones working with him.

Entrapta sends him some of her drafts for the construction bots, and asks him to consider moving to working on those once he finishes the two scrap bots he’s got in the works, if he feels up to it. At seeing her message, he turns towards the tent they’d shared last night and it makes her thrill a little, to see his faint scowl across the courtyard. She waves jubilantly at him and his ears flex. He gives her a nod and an affirmative message pings her after a moment.

Entrapta spends the morning beginning the hard work of moving their encampment _into_ the castle, which is far harder than it seems it should be. The kitchen requires a deep cleanse, full of rotting cupcakes and other sweets, and the carbonation machine seems to have been raided for parts at some point. The spiders had roosted in one of the old libraries, and the webbing and refuse there needs to be cleaned out. Bayani and some of her townspeople thankfully keep her focused, ensuring they’re concentrating on the essentials like bedrooms, bathrooms, and the kitchen/dining areas first. Entrapta still manages to commandeer a few bots to get all of her lab materials pushed into her old lab, though. She doesn’t take the time to really sort and make sure it feels… right, which will be more irritating to work in once she gets there, but… priorities!

There’s a minor problem with the sleeping quarters, at least for Hordak. There are multiple staircases throughout the castle, some shifting and changing erratically, and absolutely none of them have railings, or are wide enough for Hordak’s wheelchair to comfortably clamber up. There’s an industrial lift for moving around large machinery which hits all of the floors, but the stop at the second floor, where she’s housing all the other clones and volunteers, is very far away from the rooms. She offers him the choice of a room on the first or third floors, and he chooses a third-floor room. She’s secretly a little pleased because it puts Hordak’s room closer to hers, and her lab. She’ll still improve all her staircases, and see about putting in a people-moving elevator, but this is the best solution for now.

Entrapta wasn’t one for scheduled meal times, or really, scheduled _anything_ , before all of this but the clones keep proving that they will quite literally work themselves to injury and exhaustion, so she allows herself to be roped into scheduling. To that point, Hordak ends up spending much of the second day that they’ve made it inside in bed, too angry at everything, including his body’s own stubborn frailty, to do much more than snarl and growl. The clones seem drawn to him, but she keeps them out of his room, and spends much of the day directing things with her data pad and helping him adjust himself in bed throughout the day. He’d managed to show the clones how to transition the bots to construction mode the day before, so now she has a full platoon of construction bots at her disposal. She has the scrap-hunting bots out looking for scraps left behind from Prime’s drones as well as any horde bot bits left around so that she could build more, but Dryl hadn’t been a big location in the rebellion war, so she’s unlikely to find much of Hordak’s old tech. She sends half of her construction bots to Craggmine, which appears to be doing well with the help of the sorcerers. The other she holds out, considering offering them for Salineas since technically Mermista’s kingdom is the closest to hers… and it _does_ need a lot of rebuilding…

She still hasn’t sent the message to the sea-princess, though.

The next day, Hordak proves to be slightly confused again, not to the point of rejecting his name or her touch, but there’s been two renditions of him gravely recognizing her and being some mix of overjoyed and deeply hurt and regretful. It’s sometime after noon when he grunts awake, tensing his back and neck and arcing up a little as something hurts him.

“It’s okay, I’m here,” she cups his face with a gloved hand, and he smiles weakly up at her. “Do you think you can take another fluid pack for me?”

He blinks incomprehensibly at her, his eyes glowing faintly yellow in the dim of his room.

“Hordak?” she asks, and his eyes slowly track to hers, a faint questioning look. Good, he’s not regressing to rejecting his name again today, at least. “Okay, I’m going to hand you a snack pack, okay?” she fumbles on the bedside stand and pushes a special rehydration solution that she’s made for him towards his hands. He’s been sweating profusely and while he’s not particularly talkative about his ailments, she knows that he hasn’t been keeping down his food. It must be strange to not consume food orally, but to throw up that way, she muses. It might explain why he, or any other clone who’d experienced that, might be a little leery of consuming food if that was their only experience with their taste buds.

Hordak fumbles with the pack, clearly confused, and then seems to grow even grayer, and brings a hand shakily to his mouth as he begins slowly working himself upright.

“Oh no,” Entrapta grimaces, “come on, you’ve got to keep _something_ down today.” She whines softly, worry causing her to jitter as she helps Hordak up with her hair, and guides him to the bathroom. She pulls out her data pad to see if Lash has responded to her message from earlier fretfully. Lash is still working with the clones, and she’d picked up the recipe for a rehydration solution in one of their posts to help with other nauseated clones, but still, Hordak’s condition seems… worse. Wrong Hordak had been jittery, and hidden away in the bowels of Darla a lot during their months in space, so she knew this would take a while, but none of the other clones have this dizziness and instability, or whatever this new thing was. A relapse maybe?

Maybe it was just timing, and in the next couple of days all the rest of them would be like this as well.

Lash has been getting some of the problem cases sent to them, so they’re quick to sooth her worries. Some of the clones that appear to have had preexisting health issues are getting hit harder by the withdrawal, which tracks for Hordak. Someone in the community got a hold of some of the amniotic fluid from one of the clones and in studying the ingredients of it found that there’s definitely an opiate cocktail in the mix which is likely causing the bulk of the symptoms. Someone else had dissected a few of the clones who had unfortunately passed, and was theorizing that perhaps some of the cybernetics released some sort of hormone or other substance while the clones were attached to the hivemind as well, so it could be a double-whammy.

Lash’s only real suggestion at the moment is to just keep Hordak hydrated. If he were an Etherian, they’d consider getting him hooked into an IV at this point, but with the ports, there really was no need. They also weren’t entirely sure if the clones cardiovascular systems worked the same way as Etherians, especially with the whole _two hearts_ thing, so better safe than sorry.

Entrapta looks up as Hordak manages to crawl from the bathroom, looking faintly more like himself, less fuzzed out and confused. Perhaps its just that _in pain_ is his default, though, and she frowns at the thought.

“Hordak? I’m going to help you back into bed and give you this fluid pack, okay?” her hair reaches for him, and Hordak freezes in clear fear, his eyes wide and ears pivoting sharply downward, though he does nothing to protect himself. In fact, he goes almost completely limp, which is entirely disconcerting for other reasons. “Woah, okay, that’s new,” she steps back sharply and shivers at the sight. “Hordak?” She withdraws her hair, and that seems to sooth him. She definitely can’t pick him up with just her body, though.

He hugs himself tightly, and curls into himself, shaking.

“I am sorry, Entrapta,” he rasps roughly after a moment, his hand clutched around the First One’s crystal that she’d socketed into a setting and hung on a leather strand around his neck. He’d been clutching it desperately in hand around camp, and it had just made sense to put it in a sort of necklace. It’s under his dark blue shirt at the moment, but even when he’s not clinging to it, its presence is clearly visible by the bump on his sternum.

“It’s okay,” Entrapta takes a tentative step forward, and he lowers his arms, still shaking a little, from nerves or lack of fine motor control? It’s hard to tell. “Can you tell me what upset you?” she asks softly, slowly getting within a foot of him.

His yellow eyes flick to her hair for a moment, lingering on the ends, as if he’s expecting something different there. “I thought you were… going for the ports,” he rubs at the back of his neck subconsciously, and swallows thickly.

“Oh,” she says softly. “No, I-I wouldn’t do that,” she laughs nervously, and he looks up at her, alien and blank. With him sitting on his haunches in front of her, he’s very near to her full height, but in the moment, he seems so small.

“I am… glad,” he offers scratchily, and holds out a hand for her to help him back up. She tentatively curls a tendril of her hair in his hand and once he grips it and nods faintly, she uses it and some more of her hair to pull him up and heft him to the bed. “You should be tending to… other business,” he grunts, pulling his shirt up on the left side and connecting the tubing to the port. He makes a slightly confused chirpy noise that makes her incredibly happy, and peers at the pack. “This is different,” he gives her a quizzical look.

“How can you tell?” she asks, propelling herself up on her hair, peering at his hands and the pack in them. She hasn’t labelled it differently; it looks just the same as the clear fluid of the other fluid packs.

“It tastes different,” he clears his throat softly.

“ _You can taste through your ports??_ ” she squeals a little, and he regards her with a partially suppressed smirk.

“Yes,” he offers. “It is… different, but yes. What is this?”

“Ohthat’ssocool,” she twirls in place for a moment and he huffs a faint chuckle at the show. “It’s just a rehydration solution. Lash, the sea elf who’s working with the clones? They suggested it.”

“Ah,” he nods slightly, and begins the work of stiffly, hissingly, easing back into bed. 

“And! Also, I _am_ tending to other business, I’m just doing it from my data pad,” she waves said data pad at him and sticks out her tongue as she helps easing him into bed. He harrumphs faintly before thumping back as he settles in.


	6. Chapter 6

Hordak manages to keep down the packs she plies him with in the afternoon, and he shoos her from his room in the late afternoon while he goes to take care of his hygienic needs. She was expecting to bring up something to him for dinner, but instead he appears from the hallway leading to the industrial lift with Wrong Hordak and the injured clone in tow at the time they’ve designated for dinner. He has his head on his hand, looking mildly amused at whatever the injured clone is telling the both of them enthusiastically. He looks tired, of course, but also so much like he had back on his throne in the Fright Zone that she lets out a quiet squeak of joy at the sight.

“Ah, good, he’s doing better then?” Bayani elbows her companionably and she shifts a little further from the large taurean woman.

“Oh, hello,” he jerks slightly in surprise as the other clones swarm him, excited to see him out of his room. “Yes, it’s—I’m fine,” he waves as if to swat away their cares.

He maneuvers to the table, and the injured clone who’s been helping out with the elfin cook and Sodapop in the kitchen brings in all the packs for the clones, including one special one for Hordak that should be a little easier on his stomach than whatever the rest of them are eating. Wrong Hordak seems to prefer eating whatever the Etherians are eating, although he eats a much smaller serving than would make sense for his size. The cook-clone gives him a food pack as well, so perhaps he’s just eating for the taste and supplementing with their normal food packs for proper sustenance.

With all the fuss of the move, and helping and working with Hordak, she hasn’t paid quite as much attention to Wrong Hordak. He’s been thriving, nonetheless, moving easily through the various Etherians and clones in the castle and he seems… happy, at least. She hadn’t really thought much about it, but since he’s through with his withdrawal, his eyes and well, everything else, must be restored to normal? If that’s how it works? He looks just like every other clone had though, green eyes and platinum hair. Would Hordak ever get back his red?

She chances a glance at Hordak, and he’s pointing at something on a data pad and explaining something softly to one of the clones from the engine-room, she thinks. The clone next to them is watching the interaction curiously, but splitting their attention to listen to a technical discussion two Etherians are having on his other side.

Dinner is beginning to finish up, the conversations lulling, and Hordak catches her eye and gives a faint flick of his head to call her over, when Wrong Hordak clears his throat and stands up with a flourish.

“Uhm, yes, hello?” he gently bops his sternum. He’s wearing a bright orange blouse with painted yellow flowers on it that’s faded a bit from being stored in the sun. “I have an announcement to make!”

“I am Wrong!” he splays his arms out, like he’s presenting himself and there’s a long and hefty pause in the interim while people try to grasp his meaning.

“His name,” Hordak supplies after the moment begins to drag on.

“Yes!” Wrong grins, pointing and giving Hordak a thumbs up, very nearly finger-gunning though he clearly hasn’t been taught that gesture yet.

“Oh, good for you,” Bayani grins at him, and gives him a little fist bump. “Welcome Wrong,” one of the Etherians calls, and Bayani chuckles and elbows the woman on her other side.

Conversation picks up again, a generalized buzz, and Entrapta works her way over to Hordak since he was calling her over earlier.

“Ah, Entrapta,” he nods at her. “You have a library on site, don’t you?”

“Uhh, yesss—Several! Actually. The one the spiders were in still needs to be cleaned out, and one of the sections is only available once every fortnight,” she taps her chin, trying to remember if there’s any other notes about the libraries of the Crypto Castle.

“Oh?” Hordak gives her a focused, intrigued look that makes a wave of something hot ripple through her from her head to her toes.

“Y-yes, uhm, why?” she stammers, and shakes herself a little to clear her head.

“This one,” he gestures at the clone next to him, “is interested in learning more about Etherian languages.”

“Oh! Well, most of the Crypto Castle’s books are about traps and engineering, but if you want literature I can see if I can order or trade for something,” she gives the clone next to Hordak an encouraging smile.

“Lit-lit’ture?” the clone stumbles a little on the word, brow furrowing.

Hordak taps his fingers on the table for a moment in thought, trying to think of a way to contextualize it perhaps. He gives up and shrugs a little, “Engineering texts will be fine.”

* * *

Over the next few days, two of the other clones at the Crypto Castle go through a relapse like Hordak did, so she’s grateful that she has the rehydration solution on hand. Hordak returns to working on bots and is souping up a hybrid model blending his own horde tech with Prime’s. One of Prime’s spires collapsed on a town nearby, and the scrap bots are working on picking it clean, but honestly, it could potentially take _years_ to fully dismantle a structure of that size.

She should really be out there, in person, picking at the Spire to understand it, but there are at least twenty or more recorded on the surface, and a few that are still ominously floating in the sky, though they seem to be slowly losing their upward lift and making ground fall. What was powering them? Did Prime use the same strange liquid formula to power everything? Should they be rushing all the spires and dismantling any energy signatures inside?

Well, it’s been nearly three weeks, and nothing’s blown up, so perhaps the spires use something less volatile. Maybe.

“Note: Ask the engine-room clones if they know anything about the Spires,” she reports to her recorder. It’s primarily notes and reminders to herself these days, although, just to check, she rewinds through the tape and plays her last log: “Crypto Castle Log#12: It appears that the elemental spiders that took up residence in library 3B may have taken care of the drones and clones that were on site. Some remnants of undigestible drone materials have been recovered from the refuse in the library! Why did the spiders set up here, though? Elementals protect First One’s tech and runestones, primarily… perhaps there was a data crystal or shard somewhere in library 3B that I was unaware of! I will have to look into this later, maybe there’s even _more_ hidden passageways than I knew about and there’s a First One’s ruin hidden somewhere!”

She may have lived in this castle for all of her life, but even she knew that she’d seen perhaps a tenth of it. Sure, she’d mapped out all of it with surveillance bots when she was a teenager before she rebuilt it as a labyrinth, but parts of the castle moving and disappearing was not something she’d come up with herself. It wasn’t a stretch to assume that there might be a ruin or other large structure hidden under or around or even _within_ the castle.

Hordak and the crew he’s accidentally collected are pushing out bots at an impressive rate. She should start moving them out to help building, but for now she’s focusing on refurbing Hordak’s crates, looking into better ways of storing and moving them.

She’s been cleaning her lab all morning, frittering and getting it into a shape that she can live and work in. Her giant stacks of gadgetry aren’t quite there yet, but those stacks take time to really build and _age_ , and besides, Hordak will probably be in here too, and while he’s messy, he must like things more organized than she does. She’s not sure. He seemed to pick up and keep his tools in the same generalized location more than her.

She’s fussing with a ratcheted screwdriver that’s got a catch in the ratcheting when her screen blips at her and she jumps and nearly tosses the screwdriver into the screen.

She accepts the call, from Bow, it appears, and Glimmer’s face pops up on the screen much to her surprise.

“Hello,” Entrapta waves cautiously.

“Hi Entrapta, is Wrong Hordak with you?” Glimmer asks a little breathlessly, and she notes that she appears to be in some part of the Whispering Woods, maybe one of the old Rebellion camps by the look of it.

“No,” Entrapta glances around her lab just to make sure, and begins flipping through her surveillance feeds to figure out where he is. The castoffs he’s chosen to wear are mostly bright orange and pink, so he’s easy to pick out of the crowd, generally speaking.

Glimmer swears under her breath, and Bow swims into view, scrambling to catch the pad as Glimmer disappears in a shower of sparks. It’s a little different than her usual teleporting, so perhaps she’s still having issues with her runestone. “Ah, hello,” Bow gives her an apologetic smile. “Sorry about that, Adora and Glimmer have been collecting clones from the Whispering Woods, and a lot of them are sick, so she got worried.”

Entrapta frowns a little, finally giving in and taking apart the ratcheted screwdriver to see if she can fix the catch. “They’re probably going through withdrawal. Wrong went through his while we were in space, remember? Oh! And he goes by just ‘Wrong’ now.”

“Wait, what?” Bow furrows his brow, and the screen jiggles a bit as someone shouts and a few Etherians come into view dragging a clone over their shoulders.

“He told us at dinner a few nights ago,” Entrapta cleans the gears of the screwdriver, finding a smudge of gritty grease that appears to be the culprit.

“Wait, so he’s with you? I—just a sec,” he covers the camera with a hand and she faintly hears him calling out to someone in the background. She continues flipping through her camera feeds for a moment, and finally finds Wrong standing proudly on one of the parapets, talking flamboyantly to a very tolerant seabird by the look of it. 

“Wrong Hordak’s—Wrong, is with you? At—oh, you’re back at your lab, aren’t you?” he peers at his screen, and she nods a little as she refits the screwdriver back together.

“He’s talking to a seabird right now,” she jerks a thumb of her hair hand at her screen and points it so that Bow can see the clone gesturing broadly, causing the bird to twitch its wings a little. It doesn’t fly off surprisingly.

“Oh. Good,” Bow’s voice cracks, and he quirks his head oddly. He looks up sharply at a shower of glitter that seems to appear behind his data pad. Bow puts up a finger, and mutters, “One moment, please,” and covers the screen. She hears him talking indistinctly to someone for a moment.

“UGH! WHY DIDN’T SHE JUST SAY SO!” Glimmer seethes loudly enough to be heard through the covered microphone.

“Uh, sorry about that,” Bow rubs his face a little, a streak of white dust following his hand. There’s a faint dust line in his hair too, like he’s been stressed and rubbing his face and hair a lot lately.

“Sorry about what?” Entrapta is dismantling a horde battery pack that was lying near her desk now.

“Uhm. Well, wait. Did you say Wrong already went through this?” Bow peers at the screen.

“Yes,” Entrapta jumps as the coolant inside spurts out unexpectedly, splattering her coveralls and the desk.

“What did you call it?”

“Withdrawal. From the hivemind. You should check out Lash on the Etherian Medical Community, they have a lot of information to help you with them! I’ve got schematics for their snack packs up there too, if you need them. I’ll send you a link!”

“Oh. Sure. That’ll be really helpful, Entrapta,” Bow smiles faintly. There’s a soft ping as he receives her message, and he appears to be reading it slowly as the call goes on.

“Oh, Entrapta?” Bow asks, and this time it really hits her how tired he looks.

“You should make sure you get some sleep, Bow,” she points at the screen, trying to look a bit commanding.

“Uh,” Bow starts a little, then gives her a genuine smile. “I’ll try to do that, thanks. Uh, is Hordak with you too?”

“Yes, he’s in the courtyard making bots at the moment,” she flips over to that feed, and grins at the sight of him. There are a few clones and Etherians working on construction bots around him, and he’s working on making some sort of prototype with the remaining bits of the rusted-out bot, consolidating it down to about a third of its size.

“Making bots?” Bow’s voice cracks again, and she glances back at him. She catches sight of She-Ra walking past in the background with what appears to be three faintly struggling clones thrown over her shoulders, Catra trailing behind her, dragging another. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he rubs the back of his head, surely rubbing more dust around.

“We’re making a bunch of construction and utility bots to help with the rebuilding of places like Craggmine and wherever else needs rebuilding!” she grins.

“Oh. That’s a really great idea, Entrapta,” Bow gives what appears to be a fortifying smile, but he just looks _so tired_.

“Thanks Bow,” she perks up a little.

“Look, uh, we should talk more. I’ll give you a call later, alright? I think I need to get started making some of these medical supplies,” he frowns, squinting at something on one side of his data pad.

“Alright!”

Bow gives her a faint nod with a smile, and waves just before he cuts off.


	7. Chapter 7

Hordak’s working on his smaller scrap and detection prototype bot, or he was earlier, at least. At the moment the prototype is merely twitching idly in his lap as he jitters his leg and fine tunes a series of bugs that have cropped up in the larger scrapbot’s programming. The program was very quickly thrown together, based on his old model, but Entrapta had sent one of the bots out to search for fabrics and plant materials to create fabric this morning because one of the Etherians here was interested in tailoring and creating clothes for the clones, as well as everyone else. As a result, he’s been stuck debugging the programming all morning as it throws all kinds of errors, trying to read the sky and ground as fabric, much to his disgruntlement.

The bot searching for fabric has managed to make its way towards an old encampment by the look of it, but now that it’s finally found what actually appears to be fabric it’s having all sorts of difficulties figuring out how to collect it since it wasn’t as heavy as metal or wood, and thus having difficulty recognizing whether it was picking it up or not. Frustrating, but ultimately it would be a useful function to broaden the kinds of things that the bots could retrieve. It did sort of key into what he was working on at the moment, anyway. His new prototype is a sort of first-responder bot, detecting radiation and other hazards, and identifying any living things that might be trapped and in need of assistance. This kind of fine-tuning would need to be done eventually for that bot, so it’s a good thing to get it out of the way now.

The reason for his sudden interest in radiation and hazards was due to an encampment near the edge of the Fright Zone and Plumeria that had a Prime Spire collapse and fall mostly into the Fright Zone. He’d had to send out a lot of rapid-fire warnings about being wary of the reactors that might have been cracked in the process. Thankfully, the Etherians had been surprisingly responsive to his warnings, but it still made him concerned about the long-term effects of his and Prime’s tech on Etheria.

A drop of water plops sharply on his ear, and he jerks in alarm, looking up at the sky. The Fright Zone had suffered from acid rain, if it rained at all, but this rain doesn’t burn. Perhaps it’s just water. It has been thundering and lightning the entire time they’ve been here with no rain, which he’d thought was curious.

After a pregnant moment, the sky opens up and rain starts coming down in sheets, causing the clones and Etherians around him to squawk and start upright.

“Inside!” someone inside the castle calls, waving an arm to hail them, and Hordak nudges the clone who’s looking a bit dumbfounded on the ground next to him.

“Come on,” he grunts as he leans out of the chair to help the clone up onto his feet. As he’s guiding him to the castle, one of the legs of his chair slips a little as it nearly catches on the triggers of one of Entrapta’s traps, and he jolts and forces the chair right, away from it, but the movement manages to cause the clone to jerk away _into_ the trap instead.

“No! Don’t!” he scrambles out of the chair and has nearly dramatically thrown himself after the clone, only to find that it’s one of the defanged spike traps, and he’s gravely overreacting. The trap simply depresses a few inches and then returns to its default state as he blinks at it. He’s blushing brilliantly red, splayed on the ground with the other clone looking rather shellshocked by the entire thing, similarly spilled but in the opposite direction.

“I—I,” he swallows, and his heartbeat is roaring in his ears.

“Come on, you’re getting soaked,” one of the Etherians, named Terry or something similar, begins hefting him up roughly by the armpits and he jolts at the contact, and jerks away, snarling. “Woah, okay, I’m just trying to help!” Terry backs up, putting his hands up.

Hordak appears to have strained or quirked something in his utterly stupid leap and fall from his chair, so he stalks (limps) over to his chair and plunks in it, socking the bot prototype under his arm and heading into the castle, sternly avoiding anyone’s disdainful looks as he pushes further in the castle to the industrial lift. He just wants to get to his room, get out of his wet clothes, and maybe throw some things around his room. It feels good in the moment, even if he has to clean it up later by himself.

The nonverbal clone has joined him on the lift, to his surprise. Hordak’s fuming, practically emitting smoke from his pointy ears as he roils in his own embarrassment, and, _apparently_ , missing people approaching him. The clone flicks an ear nervously, something that this clone had done a bit on his own, but being around Hordak meant it was coming out more. _Perverting them with your own defects_ , he groans, rubbing his face, and pushing his drenched hair out of his face.

“I’m… I didn’t mean to… push you,” he offers as the lift jerks, and begins the slow ascent to the upper floors.

The clone just shuffles a little, unable to muster his thoughts into words. He should see if he can get something like Imp’s repeater installed on his data pad for him. He wasn’t even expecting this one to be outside today, he’s mostly been in the library cleaning, but apparently, today he’d decided to switch places with his… friend, he supposed was an adequate title. Clones didn’t really _have_ friends, but he’d known clones who’d pair bonded like this before. It wasn’t especially rare, but they had to keep it under wraps lest they get forcibly separated by the drones.

“You should change out of your wet clothes,” he adds, as the lift jerks to a stop at the second floor. It finally strikes him that the clone is taking the lift to be with _him_ , since it’s a long walk from here to his room. “You’ll lose body heat if you stay in that,” he gestures faintly. “Go on,” he shoos the clone off of the lift, since it almost seems like he’s going to accompany Hordak up to his room.

“…okay?” the clone asks, pointing at Hordak and visibly forcing a concerned look onto his face. Well, there’s a way to communicate that he’s picking up on, maybe more from the Etherians than himself.

“Fine,” he waves dismissively, and sighs, rubbing his forehead as the lift jerks and continues onward to the third floor. A dull pain radiates up from his hip, and he’s definitely kinked his back out of alignment, but besides that everything feels like the normal aches and pains with the added leadenness he’s felt since Prime’s defeat. His ports are beginning to chill him as the wet of his shirt seeps and soaks them, which will drip the cool into his core and make it even harder to warm up. He wiggles his shoulders uncomfortably as the lift thunks into place on the third floor. He pushes his chair down the hall towards his room, and once inside, immediately strips off the wet shirt and tosses it grumpily to the floor. It’ll wrinkle terribly, and he’ll hate picking it up and dealing with the wet spot it’ll leave behind later but it soothes the angry ache in his chest to do so in the moment.

He pushes out of his chair, and settles the prior rust-bucket bot on the desk in his room, and begins limping into the bathroom. He pauses in front of the sink to lean against it as he begins clumsily undoing the ties of his skirt.

He jerks and tenses, then groans at the way that activates the pulled and strained muscles down his back and hip, when he hears his door click open as someone enters his room from behind him.

“Oh, you shouldn’t throw clothes on the floor, brother!” Wrong picks up his sodden red sweater, a large grease stain down the side marking it as a cast-off, and begins folding it in his arms.

“Wrong,” Hordak growls, and hisses as he shifts around to look at the bubbly clone. “You need to knock before you enter,” he doesn’t bother masking the displeasure in his voice, letting his voice reverberate with the snarl and unconsciously squaring his shoulders to loom and appear larger even though he’s not wearing his armor or cape, or even a _shirt_. Intimidating people out of his space was somewhat instinctual after all this time, though.

“Oh!” Wrong pauses and looks up at him, and Hordak starts back, folding into himself uncomfortably as he sees the clone’s eyes begin tracking down his chest and arms. “I’m sorry, brother, uh, here,” he steps forward quickly and shuts the bathroom door sharply in Hordak’s face. Hordak can’t help the little puff of surprised air that leaves his lungs, and then he jumps as Wrong knocks on the door that he’s just closed in his face.

Hordak sighs deeply, and kneads his forehead.

“Brother?” Wrong asks tentatively from behind the door.

“Just a moment,” Hordak sighs, finishing unlacing his sodden skirt, and digging through the bin of dirty laundry for something to toss on that isn’t soaked. He pulls out a holey hoodie and a wrap skirt that are near the top, and gets them on.

He pushes the door open, and regards Wrong with his arms crossed over his chest. His fellow clone’s still holding the dripping red sweater in his arms, and he’s clearly come in from the rain himself and hasn’t changed from his own sodden clothes, either. He’s wearing a paisley blouse with khaki shorts today, and Hordak grimaces at the fact that with the wet sticking his clothes to his chest, he can tell that Wrong is completely unblemished, all his scales and ports in just the right places.

“Give me that,” he snaps, extending a hand for the sodden sweater, and plucking it sharply from Wrong’s hands. He sets it in the sink with the skirt he was wearing to be wrung of water later.

“You needed something?” he grunts, crossing his arms again and regarding Wrong with a level glare.

Wrong shifts a little uncomfortably, and rubs his neck. “How’d you choose your name?” he asks, and Hordak growls softly in frustration. It’s the second time he’s asked him, and he _really_ isn’t interested in explaining that to a fellow clone, especially at the moment.

“It felt right,” he offers curtly, the same answer as last time. He takes a step forward to lean on the doorjamb for support, and probably subconsciously to begin pushing Wrong out of his territory.

“…what if your name doesn’t feel right anymore?” Wrong seems to be twisting himself into a strange pretzel, one of his arms picking at his wet blouse and the other still rubbing his neck.

“You change it,” Hordak states plainly.

“You can change it?” Wrong looks up at him hopefully.

“Yes,” Hordak inclines his head a little, and frowns at the fact that Wrong’s hair is clearly dripping obnoxiously down his nose. He shifts back into his bathroom and pulls out two towels, tossing one to the other clone and beginning to dry his own hair so that he’ll get the idea. “You need to go to your room and change out of your wet clothes,” he directs, quirking a brow as Wrong keeps staring at him while holding his towel. He begins patting himself down and rubbing his head dry after a moment.

“That’s what you were doing?” he asks from within the towel as he’s rubbing down his own head and hair.

“Yes. You will get chilled from staying in wet clothes. You should take a shower to warm up as well,” he sighs, rubbing gently at a throbbing along his cheekbone.

“Okay,” Wrong bunches the towel in his hand, frowning. “What do you think of Hector?” he asks, looking entirely too hopeful and earnest.

“It does not matter what I think,” Hordak offers a hand to take the towel from him. “If it is your name, it is what you will be called,” he gives a firm nod as he takes the towel and folds it into quarters to hang back up. “Now, go take care of your clothes and stop dripping on my carpet,” he begins shooing the clone from his room.

* * *

Hector’s announcement at dinner goes over just fine, still plenty of cheering and congratulations. To be fair, the Etherians were a little weirded out by a being choosing to just be called ‘Wrong.’

Entrapta sits next to Hordak and spends most of the meal forgetting to eat as she tells Hordak about talking to Bow and then infodumping a huge amount about her ideas for the storage and movement of all the bots they’re building.

He’s paying rapt attention to her ideas, considering how to implement them with what they have on hand, and perhaps his own thinking got away from him, because she blindsides him with a topic change.

“Tomorrow, I want to do a medical examination,” she leans forward, staring at him intensely. He’s suddenly aware of the fact that most of the Etherians and clones have left, and they’re nearly alone at the long table of her dining room. His face heats, and he can’t really explain why. “We need to figure out how to stabilize your arms, and maybe we can figure out a new prototype for your exoskeleton!” she wiggles her fists, stars in her eyes, and he can’t help but smile in response even as he feels a pang of trepidation at the thought of being examined.

“P-perhaps you should focus on Hector, or one of the other clones?” he waves faintly, and her eyes track how his hand jitters a little with the motion. He’d been leaning his head on it earlier as he listened and brainstormed and it had been trembling a little then, so perhaps the topic change had been less dramatic than he thought.

“No. I think I’m going to focus on _you_ , lab partner,” she gives him a look that he’d describe as scorching, based on the way it causes something blazing to race up his spine, and makes his hearts race.

“O-Of course,” he swallows, and glances away from her.


	8. Chapter 8

It’s still pouring the next day. It will likely be pouring for the rest of the week, that’s how it tends to go in the Crypto Castle. She still hasn’t managed to get her bed situated quite as nicely as her old camelback sofa, so she could blame the grogginess she’s feeling on that, but really, waking and hearing the rain against the wall sometimes just makes her feel like this. When she’s in her lab, she’s so far in the castle that she can’t really hear the rain as much. Before she had so many guests, she’d just have been working in her lab through this storm, probably wouldn’t have even noticed it.

Her head feels fuzzy, and her hair feels… well, she can use it, but it’s slow moving just like the rest of her at the moment. When she was little, her da would braid her hair on days like this, two thick braids that moved easier in the residual damp than just her pigtails. The idea of braiding all of her hair right now just makes her groan, though.

She pulls on a thick raspberry-colored sweater over her coveralls, a long bleach stain dripped down one side of her chest because she’s always getting things down the front of her. It’s more for the comfort of it than the warmth. It never gets particularly cold in Dryl, not like it had in the Northern Reach. She sleepwalks through the morning, consuming some tiny scones and cocoa without really being aware of it, and finds herself standing under the arches in the courtyard and staring out at the rain. Well, and Hector too. Someone’s given him a plastic poncho, and he’s getting soaked even with it, alternating between staring up at the sky in wonder and spinning idly around with his arms out. He’s apparently learned the location of her courtyard traps enough to veer away from them when he gets too close, too.

She’s thumbing the button on her recorder without really thinking, zoning out and thinking about another time and place, before her dads had left on their grand adventure when she was eight and half, when she accidentally presses too hard and her own manic voice startles her. “Note to self, we still need to research mesh and—” her voice echoes across the courtyard and she hurriedly clicks the button off as Hector turns towards her and beams.

“Entrapta!” he bounds towards her, kicking off rivulets of water with every motion of his loping gate. “This rainwater is amazing! It just doesn’t stop!”

“That’s how it is in Dryl,” she gives him a wan smile, and runs her gloved hand through one of her pigtails. “Dry for ages and then it just pours and pours!”

Hector nods aptly, and peers up at the sky to keep watching the rain next to her, though he’s staying under the awning now.

“Did you get that poncho from Madam Lavena?” she asks. The woman was apparently very interested in tailoring for the clones, given their fairly uniform body types. She knew that Madam Lavena was planning on sitting with the clones and drafting outfits, patching their preferred cast-offs, and workshopping looks for the more unsure ones. Most of them still favored their original body suits and robes, but constant wear and tear of one preferred outfit had driven those at the Crypto Castle to offset with cast-offs. She knew that some of the Etherians would’ve liked the clones to color code or otherwise differentiate themselves more, but so far only Hordak and Hector had really picked singular styles. The rest of them preferred things in white or gray, cuts similar to what they’d worn on Prime’s ship. The more tinkery of the engine-room pair was beginning to experiment with colors, and had a few striped shirts that he’d collected from the cast-offs that he seemed to like based on how they worked through his rotation. The other two clones were still in solid grays, or as close as they could get with what had been available.

“Oh. No, Terry gave it to me,” Hector picks at the plastic, green eyes still glued to the rain.

“You’re warm enough?” she asks, very aware of the fact that he’s soaked to the skin. He’s wearing an outfit a tad more substantial today, but it’s still just a few layers of cloth and a plastic poncho against the endless drenching rain.

He shrugs, shaking out the poncho, “I am fine.” He smiles pleasantly at her, and walks back out into the courtyard to spin some more.

* * *

She’d had plans today to sit with Hordak, finally review his health, but now that it’s pouring, all the work on the bots has moved inside. There’s currently a crew of six in her lab, and they’re doing fantastic work, but she knows that Hordak hates having an audience at the best of times, and she’s not feeling particularly up to being around people at the moment either.

She finds Hordak with Madam Lavena, reviewing her fabric swatches and critically appraising her designs. He’s wearing some sort of vee-necked shirt that frames her crystal on his chest nicely; the sleeves of his shirt are long and swoopy, and the entire thing seems heavy and elastic. He’s sitting in his chair, but his dramatic gestures have a flair that remind her of him gesturing with his cape in the Fright Zone.

“Entrapta,” he smiles at her as he notices her arrival, and the fuzz and grogginess of the day seems to ease, just a little.

“How’s it going?” she stuffs her hands in the hefty pocket of her sweater, and steps forward to review Madam Lavena’s drawings.

“Very well,” Madam Lavena looks utterly enthused by everything laid out in front of her. “Though, I do wish they were all so—" she gestures like she’s trying to grab the word from the air. “ _Unique,_ ” is what she settles on, and she gives Hordak an overflowing grin, as if she’s paying him a grand compliment.

Hordak’s ears pull downward and a faint look of chagrin passes over his face before he can pull it back, which makes Entrapta pout since he was looking quite pleased a moment earlier. Entrapta shuffles a little in place, and turns towards Hordak, “Can I pull you away?” She feels a little petulant, but he looks nice today, and she’s feeling a bit under the weather, and maybe—maybe she can just sit with him and it’ll make her feel better. It’s not something she’s familiar with doing much, but it had helped back at the Heart camp.

Hordak gives her a concerned look and nods.

He gives Madam Lavena a mild nod to bid his leave and then walks the chair over next to her. She takes his hand in hers, surprising him clearly based on the flex of his ears, and walks back to the industrial elevator and pushes it up to the third floor. She might take him back to her room, but her room still doesn’t feel right, and it’s also where the weird feeling started this morning, so instead she walks them into his room.

“Is everything alright?” he asks warily as she releases his hand and uses her hair to clumsily push herself up into his lap on his chair. He shifts a little to make a better lap for her, and hisses as he apparently pulls or strains something painful.

“Still need to make your suit,” she mutters, shoving her face into his chest and then _hmming_ happily, because the fabric of the shirt he’s wearing feels _fantastic_ on her skin. She rubs her face against his chest like a cat, and pulls her gloves off of her hands so that she can nestle her hands into the fabric as she coils her arms around his back.

“Uh-hm,” Hordak’s voice peaks a little, not quite Bow’s cracks, but a clear discomfort in the rumble along her cheek and above her head, and she remembers that she literally just grabbed him from downstairs, pulled him into his room and jumped into his lap with hardly a word.

“’M… not feeling great,” she manages. “But your shirt feels really nice,” she wiggles against his chest, and she feels him huff a faint laugh.

“I see,” he says, and he sounds… tickled. She’s not sure she’s ever heard that tone from him before.

“Jus’—” her face is smooshed against his left pec, pulling down the fabric of his shirt so that more of his gray chest is showing, “just hold me. Please.” If she’d rehearsed this, she would’ve wanted to sound more in control, more sure of herself. She can hear the plaintive tone in her own voice, though, and her hair wriggles a little in shame behind her.

Hordak’s arms gently encircle her, one of them cradling the lank pigtail resting over the left arm of his wheelchair and the other settling on her shoulder.

“Like this?” he asks, and she wiggles, and uses her hair to get his hands on her back where they should be.

“Better,” she grins into his chest as he begins to slowly relax around her. One of his arms lies curled around her shoulders, and the other is curled around her waist. He’s so much larger than her, but it’s not daunting. It’s comforting, really.


	9. Chapter 9

She doesn’t really remember falling asleep, but she slowly wakes up lying splayed against something warm and reverberating. Her cheek is a little numb from the vibrations humming through it, as though that was the primary point of contact, though she can feel it through her head and body too. She slowly blinks awake, and feels a large clawed thumb rubbing idly at the top vertebrae of her shoulder. Hordak’s apparently tilted the chair back a bit, to give her more room to splay out, and curled his other arm back behind his own neck. She doesn’t want to move, really, she feels so deeply relaxed in the moment, but she frowns at the need to figure out the reverberations buzzing through her hands and cheek. She can’t _hear_ it, but she can certainly feel it.

“You’re purring,” she slurs a little, her lip still a little numb from lying against the buzz. He cracks an eye at her, and she gapes, because the yellow of his eyes is more of a melon-orange now. “Your eyes!” she wiggles a little on his lap and he grunts in discomfort. “Oh, _sorry,_ ” she forces herself to stop moving.

He grunts and audibly cracks his neck and stretches his shoulders, working himself out of his relaxed state.

“Feeling better?” his voice is a little buzzy, likely from the reverberations in his chest.

“Yes!” she beams. “Ooh, your eyes are changing back, I’m so glad!” she jitters her hands and starts as she sees that she has her gloves off. The faint silvery scars from various lab accidents are plainly visible, as well as the artificial thumb on her left hand. “Oh,” her voice pitches down awkwardly. He begins shifting the chair back into an upright position, but pauses and follows her eyeline to what she’s looking at.

His eyes flick up to hers, and he gives her a questioning look. “Are you alright?” he asks.

“I’m fine! I—I just,” she feels a bit silly about being embarrassed about her hands, considering that she’s apparently pulled Hordak’s very nice slinky bell sleeved shirt so far around that most of his upper chest is exposed, including a discolored blob on his left side. “Uh, I don’t. I never showed you my hands,” she wiggles the digits at him, the one thumb making a mild mechanical noise.

He gives her a puzzled look, his eyes flicking between her hands and her face a few times.

“They are… very nice,” he offers after a moment, sliding them both back in the chair as it jerks into upright mode. She giggles at him, and he frowns.

“Thank you,” she beams, and he continues to look puzzled.

“I do not understand,” he says, frowning.

She shrugs a little, practically radiating happiness, and his brow furrows as he apparently finally notices the mechanical thumb. “Oh,” he quirks his head curiously and tentatively reaches out to touch it, giving her plenty of time to stop him. “Impressive,” he offers, gently pushing and pulling the digit with his index finger and thumb to test its tensile strength and mobility. She twerks the joint back unnaturally, and he jerks in surprise, his ears twitching down in fear of having hurt her before he registers her grin.

“You made this yourself?” he brings his thumb up next to hers, appearing to eyeball the similarities, but it just makes her incredibly aware of how large and clawed his hands are.

“ _Yesss_ ,” she presses her hand up into his palm, wriggling a little on his lap, “ooh, I should’ve put a claw on it, I never even thought about that!” He smirks a little at her, keeping his fingers and hand relaxed against hers. It still tremors faintly, though.

“Oh, can I—I should look at your arms!” she exclaims, then pauses as she realizes just how mussed his shirt is. She moves to right it over his shoulders so it doesn’t get stretched irreparably.

She feels him tense underneath her at mentioning his arms, and she’s aware that he’s not purring anymore. He probably hasn’t been for a while, but the tensing of his shoulders and stomach reminds her.

“I won’t hurt you,” she offers softly, resting her hands on his shoulders. “Or, I’ll try not to! I don’t want to hurt you.”

Hordak swallows thickly, avoiding her eyes. “Of course,” he offers, sounding a little strained.

She shifts herself off of Hordak’s lap, and pulls out her recorder with her hair, thumbing the record button. “Medicial Examination Log#1,” she starts. Hordak is gently rolling and working the bell sleeve up on the arm closest to her so that it’s above his elbow, exposing the white flesh of his forearms, the strange holes atrophied through them, and the swirls of darker… skin? She isn’t sure what his skin is like. She honestly hasn’t touched it directly before to really get a feel for it; her hair is somewhat sensitive, but only in the sense that she can tell when she’s touching something, not anything more specific than that. His skin had been smooth against her cheek when she woke up, but she hadn’t been feeling particularly focused on science at that moment. More data needs to be collected!

“Subject has holes through both forearms which may be impeding fine motor control,” she uses her hair to gently tilt his arm this way and that. It’s still startling to see a huge hole through someone’s arm like that. “These holes were present prior to—prior to—” she pauses, frowning as she remembers her interaction with Hector this morning. Of all the clones, he seems to enjoy wearing shorts and short-sleeves the most, and now that she thinks about it, he’s got ports in his arms that match the holes in Hordak’s arms.

“Did someone yank out your ports?” she asks, pulling his arm closer and feeling along the internal edge where the radius and ulna come together, where the port likely would’ve connected. He makes a strangled noise and yanks his arm back, clutching it back to his chest and rubbing compulsively along the spot she’d just been touching. “Did I hurt you?” she asks, vibrating and hovering worriedly over his lap.

“N-no,” he grits. “It is sensitive,” he manages, shivering a little, and his teeth chatter faintly as he speaks before he grits through it.

“I thought it was atrophy, but it’s not! Someone removed your ports! Both! Both of your ports! Or were they damaged in battle? Or—”

“No,” Hordak cuts her off, his fingers rubbing down the radial inside towards his wrist, firm but gentle as he appears to be soothing himself. “I. The treatment for my defect…” his lip curls disdainfully as he looks away from her, pausing as he searches for the words and rubs at the veins and tendons in his wrist. “My flesh was too weak,” he offers after a moment.

She frowns deeply at him, trying to understand. “The treatment caused this?” she asks, gesturing at his arms. He nods and she feels something very enormous in her head and heart that throbs and robs her of words for a moment.

“That’s. That can’t be right,” she begins pacing next to him. “No—there’s—it’s—What were they trying to cure? Did it work? What were they trying to do? Why? Were they aware it would do this?” she paces tightly, her hair swirling around her as her mind races through potential hypotheses. She may not be an expert at biology or medicine, but this really can’t be an acceptable outcome, can it? Were whatever medical issues Hordak had really worth burning holes through _both_ of his forearms?

“It was necessary,” he sighs. “It was a long time ago, Entrapta,” he offers. She’s vaguely aware of the fact that he sounds concerned. _For her_. She laughs a little manically, and that just makes his frown crease deeper.

“Gnn,” she flails a little, still very upset by all of these implications that she hadn’t considered. “What are the ports in your forearms for, anyway?” she reroutes, focusing on something marginally less upsetting. They had so many ports on their bodies, maybe the ones on their arms were of little consequence, so it was considered an acceptable loss. _She_ wouldn’t consider it acceptable, but Prime and his Galactic Horde had wildly different ideas about what was acceptable, clearly.

“We use them to connect to some haptic interfaces,” he rolls his wrist and finally rests his arm back on the edge of his chair, within her grasp. She gets the feeling that he’s trying to calm her down by allowing her to inspect him. “And for our tithes,” he adds.

“Tithes?” she stops sharply in her pacing as if struck, blindsided by a word that she was not expecting at all.

“Horde Prime gives us life, and we must tithe in kind,” he states plainly, gesturing with his still covered arm. He appears to be completely unaware of what a strange concept that is.

“Wow,” is really all she can manage at that. “Okay! Well,” she rubs at her temple with a sluggish hair hand. “Okay, that’s a lot! But,” her eyes flick back to the faint tremoring of the limb in front of her and she delicately picks it up with her hair. “You didn’t tremble like this out of your armor before. Did you?”

“No,” he lets her gently extend and curl his fingers, as she raptly watches the tendons in his wrist pull and twang with the motions. “I installed… unauthorized augments,” he clenches his hand into a fist as he realizes that she’s trying to push his fingers into that motion. It trembles terribly with the effort of holding it for more than a few seconds. “Prime removed the port when I was returned. I’m unsure how much damage was done to the cybernetics through my forearms. They seemed only interested in the port,” he shakes his hand out, releasing the fist.

She hears the whole ‘Prime removing helpful augments’ thing. She does. But she has to just power through it, work past it. Horde Prime is dead, Hordak is here and she’s is going to help him get his augments back. She is going to help fix this.

“Okay, so we’ll do a scan of your arms to see what cybernetics are left. How did you install the augments before?” she looks up at him, and frowns at the grim look that passes over his face.

“I had a surgical interface in my lab,” he sighs.

“Maybe there’s some of it left! We can rebuild it! Do you have any schematics of it, maybe we can just build—” he puts up his hand to stop her.

“It was destroyed by the first Princess Alliance, a long time ago. It was part of my ship. Most of the Demitasses have them, I think. They’re difficult to maintain, very finicky machines,” he taps his fingers idly on the arm of his chair. “The machine that assembled my armor was my gross approximation of it, but I would not trust it to perform surgery of that nature.”

“Oh. So. ‘Demitasse’ was the name of your ship?” she asks.

He nods, then shrugs slightly as he moves to correct her assumption, “Any of the class of single-clone ships are called ‘Demitasse.’”

“So, if we find another Demitasse, it might have a surgery machine it?” she asks, and his brows quirk up as he starts to follow her train of thought.

“Yes, I suppose it would.”

“Alright!” she twirls in place. “C’mon, let’s go to the lab and I’ll see if I can’t find where some of the ships might be.”

“Well, that might be more difficult than expected,” he offers mildly, rolling his sleeve back down as she begins powering past him to leave his room and head to the lab.

“What? Why?” she flips herself around, too fast with her hair being uncooperative, and stumbles near the door.

He gives her a concerned look, but she shakes herself and sets herself down on her feet to just walk like a normal person, _ugh_.

“Our ships are not meant to stay on the ground. If you do not crash, like I did, then they will drop off the soldiers and then return to Prime,” he walks his chair next to her, watching her with a clear thread of concern.

“Okay, not great. There’s still a chance that there’s at least one somewhere on Etheria, though. Besides what’s left of yours,” she rubs her chin, turning sharply as they reach the entrance to her lab. “And if not, then we’ll just have to go up to the big tree and see what we can find up there!”

Hordak huffs faintly behind her, choosing to leave the chair at the door since the room is really too cluttered with bits of bot and people bent over working on said bits to really maneuver it around safely. He walks slowly and carefully up to stand beside her after a moment and leans heavily against the worktable. He uses his height to interface with her largest screen, typing in some specifications and pulling up a map of Etheria.

“I suppose we will have to send out scouts,” he harrumphs, considering the clearly outdated map which still shows a whole and complete Sea Gate, amongst other things.

“That’s a good idea,” she begins typing madly on one of her screens. “Ooh, we have all those pieces of Prime’s scouts, we could base it off of those!”

He makes a faint affirmative noise, and turns as a faun child tugs gently on his sarong. He gives her a wave and heads off to look at whatever he needs help with while she begins iterating on a modified scout drone.


	10. Chapter 10

She’s partway through assembling a drone when all of her screens begin flashing and bleeping at her with an incoming call, which is what she gets for plugging her personal data pad into her computer. She nearly falls off of her stool, and jumps to disconnect the data pad from her computer. Hordak glances back at her, wondering if she needs help, but she waves him off with a sloppy hair hand and accepts the call.

“Hi!” she beams at the screen and realizes that she didn’t check who was calling. It appears to be Adora and Glimmer, at least, and not anyone more sinister. She dusts off her shirt, unaware of the splash of grease over her brow.

“Hi Entrapta,” Adora gives her a warm smile, as Glimmer furrows her brow at her. Entrapta rubs her forehead absent-mindedly, glancing at Bow in the background who appears to be on a data pad making another call.

“What’s up? How are the clones doing?”

“Clones?” Glimmer starts, looking like she’d been about to say something before Entrapta interrupted her.

“Yeah. From the Whispering Woods?” she pulls the drone she was working on over to her so that she can concentrate.

“Oh!” Adora smiles. “Yeah, they’re uh… well, they’re doing… okay?” she shrugs a little.

“Look, Entrapta, we’re— _I’m_ calling a meeting of the Princess Alliance. Tomorrow,” Glimmer interrupts, shaking a finger and clearly putting on her _I’m a Queen_ persona.

“Tomorrow?” Entrapta pauses in her wedging of two pieces together.

“ _Yes_ ,” Glimmer grits, flares of glitter dripping from her hair.

“Uhhhh,” Entrapta rapidly taps into her larger computer. “I haven’t cleared the roads yet, and I don’t think anyone’s cleared the road to Brightmoon from here,” she scratches her head with a tuft of her hair. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get a transport there for a week, at the best, though I could maybe retrofit a transport for aerial flight and get there sooner? Unless you were planning on teleporting here and taking me with you, wait—is your runestone working again?”

“Nrrrgh,” Glimmer growls, and is about to go off on a tirade when Bow calls from the background, “I _told_ you! Seamista—er, Sea Hawk— _Mermista_! Can’t make it for a week.”

Adora appears to be trying to hide a smirk as she looks down at Glimmer, who’s fuming visibly.

“Be here in a week,” she commands, pointing at the screen and glowering.

“Okay!” Entrapta nods amiably.

“Oh. Good,” Glimmer pauses. “Bring Hordak with you,” she adds, shaking her finger again.

“Okay?” Entrapta goes back to tinkering.

“We want to make sure we’re all working together, uh, y’know, with—everything. There’s a lot. To do!” Adora adds awkwardly.

“Yeah, I know what you mean! I’m working on building bots to help rebuild and map out Etheria, clean up all the junk Prime left behind, andddd—I keep forgetting to clear the roads and other basic stuff, but I’m working on it!” she huffs and waves a hair hand absent-mindedly.

“Oh. Good. That’s—That’s good, Entrapta,” Adora smiles at her.

“Thanks! Did you need anything else?”

“N-no,” Glimmer seems like she was still expecting more of a pushback.

“Alright. Well, see you,” Adora waves, and cuts the transmission.

Hordak walks up and pauses next to her, moving to lean against the worktable and ending up deciding to just sit on it instead.

“Are you alright?” he asks softly, his ear flicking curiously.

“Yes! Look, what do you think?” she brandishes the prototype scout at him and he smiles a little. “Oh. And you heard? The Princess Alliance wants to meet in a week, I guess we should start working on an aerial transport.”

“Perhaps the scout will find some skiffs we can work with,” Hordak gently takes the drone from her, turning it around to peruse it. “If not, we’ll just modify the transport we came in on again.” He nods, considering the connection of two joints that she dovetailed a little forcefully.

“Oh,” he pauses, delicately flicking open the control panel on the bottom. “That one?” he points towards the clone who’s working with the faun child. He’s wearing an overlarge long-sleeved shirt with yellow and navy stripes. He’s the more verbal of the pair that she’d pulled up to the help with the engines on the Velvet Glove, she thinks. She nods.

“He wishes to be called Noga,” Hordak flicks a switch and fusses with a wire as something doesn’t direct power correctly.

“Oh. Okay,” she nods. “I wonder if the other clones elsewhere are taking names?” Entrapta taps her hands on the desk and Hordak gives her a bemused look.

“If not, you Etherians will be naming them,” he shakes his head faintly. She pauses.

“Wait. You _did_ choose your name, didn’t you? You want to be called Hordak?”

He quirks a brow at her, confused. “Of course,” is all the answer he gives her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Act 4 may be slightly delayed due to real life stuff, but fear not, this is not the end of the series.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are appreciated, even if I don't get back to you, I read them! 
> 
> Come yell at me on [tumblr](https://daezdlo.tumblr.com/), if you like.


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